Technology has opened up many solutions and tools that allow the average to dabble in easy online graphic editors. Many would agree there is one online design tool that is increasingly more popular than the rest – Canva. And with multiple Canva alternatives, creating beautiful designs is not just for the professionals.
SKILLSHARE: SOCIAL MEDIA DESIGN SCHOOL WITH CANVA
With our special offer, you get a full month of Premium Membership on Skillshare for free! Access this and more premium classes free of charge, cancel anytime you want.
Don't miss it!
To make your life even easier, we've put together a few sources for cool social media graphics here.
19 of the Top Graphic Design Alternatives to Canva:
Here is our list of tools like Canva and other Graphic Editors and Photo Editing Tools if you are on a small marketing budget. Some of these are more social media tools, where others are more design makers. Most of them have an image library included and replace Photoshop for basic edits without ever visiting a design school. At almost all of them you'll find native templates for social media graphics and print materials.
Use any of these tools with the help of our 102 tips to creating visual content without the aid of a graphic designer!
Adobe Spark (20% Off) (recommended)
For impactful designs that are made effortlessly, Adobe Spark is another easy to use platform that lets you create images in a matter of minutes. This is ideal for graphic designers who are already familiar with the Adobe Suite of tools.
- Over 25K templates
Choose from the trendiest premium templates - Free images and icons
Access millions of free images, icons, and GIFs - Adobe Fonts
Get the complete library of beautiful Adobe Fonts - What watermark?
Remove the Adobe Spark watermark – forever - One-tap personalization
Apply your logo, colors, and fonts in one magical tap - Brandify
Create from branded templates and themes - Collaboration
Teamwork makes the dream work – invite others to collaborate - Multiple brands
Easily switch between brands while editing projects to boost your productivity
Available on the web or on mobile, this platform offers three mobile apps: Spark Post for creating social images, Spark Page for designing web pages, and Spark Video for creating short videos in minutes. These mobile apps are available on Google Play and Apple Store. Adobe Spark offers a free plan that allows you to use some free templates.
Want an in-depth look at this tool? Check out our Adobe Spark review!
Pixlr
Pixlr offers users a faster and smarter platform for editing photos. It features easy-to-navigate photo editing tools that let you adjust, draw, retouch, apply filters, and other elements on your images for a more artistic take on sharing photos.
You can easily crop or resize photos and even remove the background easily, among many other common image editing tasks. The best, tool unfolds into two different image editors, depending on your needs: Pixlr X is very user-friendly and perfect for creating simple and quick graphics, while Pixlr E is more advanced and ideal for designing more complex visuals.
Pixlr is available both on the web or mobile, with the mobile app available for download via Google Play and Apple Store.
Ideal for: pro and amateur photographers who need to add a bit of TLC to their photos.
Save 20% in your premium monthly subscription to Pixlr!
PicMonkey by Shutterstock
PicMonkey is a very complete design platform for creatives, that is now under the Shutterstock umbrella. It comes with multiple tools to create on-brand, show-stopping visuals: a photo editor, quick image retouch, design templates, including specific ones for popular mediums like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and much more.
As part of the suite, you get access to lots of professional stock photos, illustrations, and videos that you can easily incorporate into your design. There is also a mobile app to work on the go, and as a bonus, you can also find lots of useful tutorials and guides to make the best out of their features.
Ideal for: Marketing creatives looking to make stunning content using Shutterstock images
Fotor
Whether you need to edit a photo, create a collage, or design an image for a blog post, Fotor will provide you with an easy-to-use platform and with their drag and drop feature taking just a few clicks. For newbies and experts alike, Fotor also provides a library of short video tutorials and articles and a collage maker.
There are also thousands of professionally-designed templates and canvas design available ideal for various social media channels, like Instagram posts, Facebook covers, YouTube banners, and more. For creating designs on the go, Fotor’s mobile graphics design app is also available for download on the Apple Store and Google Play.
Ideal for: photographers who need to do some photo editing, this online design tool features HDR photography technology and photo retouching kit.
RelayThat
No need for artistic skills here. With RelayThat, you can make use of thousands of auto-generated visuals using their library, all of which you are free to resize and remix. This top-rated digital asset management (DAM) and design platform let you collaborate with your team and clients to create the perfect graphic designs for your needs.
You can also work with their concierge team to import brand assets and send messages through a custom portal. Using RelayThat’s smart layouts, you can create different designs that stick to your brand and are optimized to suit various channels.
Ideal for: startup businesses and small business owners who don’t have graphic designers in-house to help with their projects.
PixTeller – AppSumo Deal
PixTeller – this free online photo and animation maker will let you easily create various designs and animations that will suit your needs. With more than 1.5 million photos, 134,000 templates, 100,000+ shapes, and 158+ animations, you are sure to find the perfect elements for any type of design.
You can easily create images with different gradients and transparent backgrounds, create quick animations using the PixTeller Animation Timeline, or even automatically create images and video layouts through PixBot.
Ideal for: This is a perfect solution for social media marketers that want to spice up their social media posts.
Originally priced at $144, get it on AppSumo on sale for just $59.
Easel.ly
Easily convert and visualize various ideas by turning them into stunning infographics with Easel.ly. This simple infographic maker can help you turn any wordy content or complex process into a beautiful and easy-to-understand graphics.
This tool is perfect for agencies who regularly create reports for their clients. It offers a wide selection of pre-made templates for creating infographics for timelines, processes, resumes, comparisons, reports, and more. Easelly has a free version with a few basic features.
Ideal for: creating reports, presentations, resumes, or even as an image for your blogs, this graphic design program will make it easy for you to capture your audience’s attention.
Visme
Visme offers more than 500 beautiful templates and color schemes, millions of photos, hundreds of custom fonts, and thousands of icons to help you create presentations, infographics, social media, and more. You can also add interactive charts, maps, videos, and audios to your designs to help you get your message across to your audience.
Ideal for: SMBs and startups who are pitching new projects.
BeFunky
This all-in-one graphic design program provides its users with a seamless workflow for editing photos, making collages, and designing graphics. With BeFunky, you can turn photos into art, edit photos by batch, create transparent backgrounds, and retouch portraits.
Its suite of powerful graphic design tools includes loads of customizable design templates, over a million free stock images, and thousands of icons and vector graphics. The BeFunky mobile app also provides a selection of editing tools such as photo effects and collage templates. Available for both iOS and Android mobile users.
Ideal for: amateur photographers who need to edit their photos.
Infogram
This intuitive visualization tool lets individual users and teams create beautiful infographics, reports, charts, maps, and more. Infogram gives its users access to a large collection of designer templates.
They also provide custom templates to help brands stick to their design guidelines that meet the (brand) colors, fonts, and logos defined for a specific brand. Object animations, interactive charts, and maps will help you create better visual content that your audience will admire.
With Infogram, you can also collaborate with your team and view or restore previous versions without the stress. And if you want to keep track of the performance of your content, Infogram will make that easy for you with its analytics feature. Also, Infogram offers a free plan with some 37+ interactive charts types among other things.
Ideal for: must-have for startups and digital marketers who are promoting blog content online.
FotoJet
For powerful design and editing tools for creating photo collages, Instagram stories, and email headers, FotoJet is the way to go. Its template-based approach to creating various graphic designs will help even a beginner level designer to create professional-looking images.
This simple photo editor also lets you add text or effects to photos, as well as crop, resize, and enhance images for a more artistic image that is worth sharing with the world. Also, FotoJet has a free basic version with features such as editing tools, fonts, photo effects among others.
Ideal for: Fotojet is perfect for amateur graphic designers who need a helping hand.
Pablo by Buffer
Pablo is a quick and easy-to-use online design tool that provides users with the ability to add text or logo to social media images.
Its simple editing interface is very easy to use but only offers limited options in terms of effects, formats, and fonts and font sizes and colors. This gives its users fewer choices to concern themselves and therefore spend less time creating social media graphics.
Ideal for: a fan favorite with startups, this tool is great for teams who have limited graphic design resources.
Easil
Let your graphic arts come to life with this easy to use graphic design program. Easil offers thousands of fully customizable templates for creating social web posts, posters, infographics, banners, business cards, menus, and more.
These high-quality templates can be resized to suit your needs. Its text effect tools allow you to be more creative with text to help make your images pop! Easil Plus Plan lets you save custom color palettes, logos, fonts, and images with Brand Kit.
Brand Kit also provides users with the opportunity to create exclusive brand templates that can be shared with your team.
Ideal for: Perfect for digital marketers and social web marketing teams who collaborate.
Stencil
If you are looking for online graphic design cloud-based software that provides users with flexibility and a large selection of features, then Stencil is a great choice. With more than 2 million photos, icons, and graphics to use, you can create a variety of images for different purposes.
This platform will let you upload your own fonts and logos to give you more opportunities to personalize your designs. If you want to create quotes to share online, you can browse through more 100,000 quotes in Stencil’s library.
Improve your images using image filters, resize them instantly, share directly to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, or schedule your posts via Buffer. This free image creator is fast and easy to use and can also be used as a Chrome or Safari extension and a Firefox Add-on.
Ideal for: a must-have for digital marketing and social media agencies who are creating and posting social media content on behalf of their clients. Stencil is an important player.
Snappa
Perfect for creating images for social media and blog posts, Snappa is an easy-to-use online design tool that also gives you the option to instantly share your freshly designed graphics to various social web platforms or connect your Snappa account with Buffer and easily schedule your posts.
You have free access to more than 1 million stock images, 200+ fonts, and more than 100,000 vectors and shapes available in Snappa’s library to create beautiful images. With Snappa’s preset dimensions and thousands of pre-made templates, you can easily create impactful posts images that are sure to gain your audience’s attention.
Ideal for: Another awesome tool for amateur graphic designers and social media marketers, especially in SMBs and startups.
DesignBold
Incorporating the simplicity of the drag-and-drop interface and the ease of using keyboard shortcuts, DesignBold lets you create stunning images effortlessly and in no time at all. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert graphic designer, DesignBold will give you the opportunity to create share-worthy photos using preset filters or by using the platform’s advanced photo editing tools.
You are free to use DesignBold’s growing resources including millions of images, hundreds of fonts, a vast collection of layouts, and more than 50 document formats. This platform also makes it easy for users to save designs to Dropbox.
Ideal for: graphic designers of all skill levels.
PiktoChart
With a wide selection of professionally-designed templates, an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, and a platform that’s designed for team collaborations, PiktoChart makes collaborative graphic design easy.
With more than 800 templates to choose from, you can easily create infographics, presentations, posters, and flyers for different purposes. You can add images, animated icons, interactive charts, and videos for more eye-catching designs that you can simply print or directly share online.
Ideal for: A perfect solution for graphic design teams with limited resources.
Desygner
No matter how inexperienced you are in creating artwork, this online design tool will let you create beautiful images for your social media posts, presentations, ads, flyers, and more. With Desygner’s iOS and Android apps, you can create graphics anytime, anywhere.
You can simply change images, fonts, colors, and texts, as well as work with layers, effects, and multiple-page files. With millions of images, thousands of icons and shapes, and hundreds of pre-made banners and fonts, all royalty-free, you won’t have to worry about finding the right elements for your designs.
Once your design is ready, you can share it via email and various social media platforms, use it for your presentation, or download a high-resolution copy of the design for printing.
Ideal for: amateur graphic designers who have limited resources
Placeit
Whether you need shirt design mockups, logo or video templates, text animations, or social web posts, Placeit has you covered. With a choice of monthly or annual membership, you get to have access to the vast selection of design resources that they have available.
Apart from having the biggest library of mockups online, they also provide users with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop platform for creating beautiful designs for all sorts of prints and posts.
Placeit also provides flexible templates for video slideshows, ads, and social media posts to help you create unique visual content for sharing and printing. Looking for the perfect logo for your brand? Placeit can help you with that! With thousands of options available, and more designs being added each week, you are sure to find the logo that is right for your business.
Ideal for: eCommerce brands that sell creative designs or personalized prints.
BONUS: TailorBrands
Every company starts with a logo and brand identity. And this is exactly what TailorBrands helps you to get in a very easy and accessible manner. This is an online service that lets you introduce your company's name and your design preferences into an AI-powered program that uses this information to suggest you possible logos, that you can further customize for a perfect, unique design.
TailorBrands solves the issues of long turnarounds and costly designer honorariums while giving you a personalized logo good to use anywhere in your business, plus extra marketing and branding materials. The best of all is it doesn't require any design skills whatsoever, all you have to do is enter your ideas and preferences and the system does the rest!
This is a paid service, with three available pricing tiers (monthly or annual memberships), but now you can get it with 40% off using our exclusive TailorBrands coupon!
Ideal for: It's the ultimate solution to get an original company logo and branding materials fast and without spending much.
Canva Alternative Conclusion
According to Adobe research, 59% of global consumers prefer beautiful design to simple, elementary design before they choose to engage with a brand. This has driven up the demand for graphic design cloud-based programs and the need to have them readily available. That's why Adobe offers Adobe Spark, which is one of the easiest-to-use editors.
Canva’s graphic design platform has revolutionized how we create various types of creative content, such as social media images, infographics, shirt design templates, media images, and more. We now also offer an Exclusive Canva Pro 45-day free trial here. Canva’s mobile app for iPhone, iPad, and mobile phones with Android are also available for download via the Apple Store and Google Play, letting users create free artwork even without access to their computers. Canva also has perfect Canva Templates and a free plan to start designing. The stock photos if you use Canva pretty good and integrate well into their pro plan and other features. You can recognize a Canva Design pretty easily if you make graphics for a living. The full details on the service are in our Canva review.
You don’t even need to be an expert or study graphic design to get stunning results. Many graphic professionals, business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs are raving about this graphic tool, including Candy Bigwood, Mobile Art Director at The Huffington Post. Giving a user’s perspective, she said, “There are no design skills required, or costly program downloads that have to go through approvals. Results are instantaneous.”
However, Canva has a number of limitations that tend to be an issue for some of its users. Image editing options are still limited compared to other editors. Its resize feature is only available for premium users and if you want to use some better-looking images in their library, you have to pay for them.
So if you are a fan of this free image creator, but are looking for websites like Canva online with better or comparable features, Stock Photo Secrets have compiled 18 of the top graphic design websites Canva alternatives and apps like Canva.
In conclusion, no matter what your purpose is in creating graphic designs, there is more than one way for you to achieve the design goals that you have in mind. With the design sites like Canva listed above, you will soon find the perfect online design tool that suits your needs and preferences. We recommend t check if you want to pay per month or per export. You should also know if you need stock photos included or if you are willing to pay to peruse.
If you’re not sure where to start, here are some of our go-to best Canva alternatives: Adobe Spark is the perfect solution for anyone who loves Adobe's editing tools and has the power to make amateur work look professional. Fotor has a user-friendly platform with lots of helpful tutorial videos. Relaythat is great for teams that need to collaborate either internally or with their clients.
Looking for images to use in Canva projects or alternative sites, use our discount codes to get massive reductions in your stock photo purchases from world-class stock agencies.
And as we said at the beginning, now you can test Canva Pro for 45 days for free.
Maybe we missed one of your favorite tools? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Uhhh PixTeller is the best when it comes to make my animations. Thank you Amos for sharing this list
Than you Alecu – glad we could be helpful.